Tag Archives: Arjuna

In the well-known Bhagavad Gita section of India’s Mahabharata epic, Krishna elaborates a view of duty and action intended to convince Arjuna that, as a member of the warrior caste (ksatriya),he must overcome all his doubts and take up arms, even against his relatives. As anyone familiar with either the Mahabharata or India’s second great epic, the Ramayana, knows, martial techniques have existed on the South Asian subcontinent since antiquity. Both epics are filled with scenes describing how the princely heroes obtain and use their humanly or divinely acquired skills and powers to defeat their enemies: by training in martial techniques under the tutelage of great gurus like the brahmin master Drona, by practicing austerities and meditation techniques which give the martial master access to subtle powers to be used in combat, and/or by receiving a gift or a boon of divine, magical powers from a god. On the one hand, there is Bhima who depends on his brute strength to crush his foes, while on the other, we find the “unsurpassable” Arjuna making use of his more subtle accomplishments in single point focus or his powers acquired through meditation.

Among practitioners and teachers of kalarippayattu, the martial art of Kerala, southwestern coastal India, some. . . model their practice on Bhima, emphasizing kalarippay attu’s practical empty hand techniques of attack, defense, locks, and throws. Others. . . follow Arjuna and emphasize kalarippayattu as an active, energetic means of disciplining and “harnessing” (yuj, the root of yoga) both one’s body and one’s mind, that is, as a form of moving meditation. As comparative religions scholar Mircea Eliade has explained, “One always finds a form of yoga whenever there is a question of experiencing the sacred or arriving at complete mastery of oneself . . .” (Eliade, 1975:196).

From the early Tamil Sangam “heroic” (puram) poetry, we learn that from the fourth century B.C. to 600 A.D., a warlike, martial spirit predominated across southern India. . .

Each warrior received “regular military training” (Subramanian, 1966:143144) in target practice, and horse riding, and specialized in the use of one or more of the important weapons of the period, including lance or spear (vel), sword (val) and shield (kedaham), bow (vii) and arrow. The importance of the martial hero in the Sangam Age is evident in the deification of fallen heroes through the planting of hero-stones (virakkal; or natukal, “planted stones”) which were inscribed with the name of the hero and his valorous deeds (Kailaspathy, 1968:235) and worshipped by the common people of the locality (Subramanian, 1966:130).

The heroes of the period were “the noble ones,” whose principal pursuit was fighting and whose greatest honor was to die a battlefield death (Kailasapathy, 1968; Hart, 1975, 1979). The heroic warriors of the period were animated by the assumption that power (ananku) was not transcendent, but immanent, capricious, and potentially malevolent (Hart, 1975:26, 81). War was considered a sacrifice of honor, and memorial stones were erected to fallen heroic kings and/or warriors whose manifest power could be permanently worshipped by one’s community and ancestors (Hart, 1975, 137; Kailasapathy, 1968, 235).

Like their epic and purist counterparts, for traditional kalarippayattu practitioners attaining power in practice is still a composite, multi-dimensioned set of practices. There is the power to be attained through repetition of mantra, each of which must be individually accomplished; the power inherent in discovery and control of the internal energy/breath (prana-vayu); the strength of mental power (manasakti) manifest in one-point focus and complete doubtlessness; the elemental discovery and raising of the power per se (kundalini sakti); and the powers of the divine gained through worship and rituals (puja), meditation, devotion, and/or magic.

However, to gain access to the majority of these types of power, one must begin with the body and its training in actualizing particular powers. A Muslim master once told me, “He who wants to become a master must possess complete knowledge of the body.” As assumed in traditional yoga practice, knowledge of the body begins with the physical or gross body (sthula-sarira), discovered through exercises and massage. Together they are considered body preparation” (meyyorukkam). The exercises include a vast array of poses, steps, jumps, kicks, and leg movements performed in increasingly complex combinations back and forth across the kalari floor. Collectively, they are considered a “body art” (meiabhyasam). Individual body-exercise sequences (meippayattu) are taught one by one, and every student masters simple forms before moving on to more complex and difficult sequences. Most important is mastery of basic poses (vadivu), named after animals and comparable to basic postures (asana) of yoga, and mastery of steps (cuvadu) by which one moves into and out of poses. Repetitious practice of these outer forms eventually renders the external body flexible (meivalakkam) and, as one master said, “flowing (olukku) like a river.”

Krishna repeatedly tells Arjuna to surrender everything to him in love…The whole point of the path of love is to transform motivation from “I, I, I” to “thou, thou, thou”- that is, to surrender selfish attachments by dissolving them into the desire to give…

Manmana: this is the refrain of the Gita. Krishna tells Arjuna, “Fill your mind with me, focus every thought on me, think of me always”, then “you will be united with me” (see 9:34).

In practical terms, it means that awareness will be integrated down to the deepest recesses of the unconscious, which is precisely the significance of the word yoga.

The Gita is a gospel of action. Krishna exhorts Arjuna to fight, to do his duty, to be a karma-yogi. But it is also a gospel of knowledge. No action is complete, or desirable, without knowing why, how and when to act. So Arjuna has to be jnana-yogi as well. Krishna places a vey high value on knowledge that crystallises into wisdom. But knowledge is not complete, or desirable, without shraddha, faith, spontaenous feeling, which in its best form becomes bhakti or devotion. Arjuna must learn to be a bhakti-yogi also.

So in the concluding Canto, the paths of action, knowledge and devotion merge in a single direction : moksha-samnyasa (which means salvation through self-surrender, or renunciation, and which is the title of the Canto).

‘Act one must’, says Krishna (shloka 11), but act only after learning from Samkhya philosophy that ‘ work is ruled by five causes : matter, agent, motive, motion, fate’. And finally, ‘have faith in me : worship me’ (madbhakto mam namaskuru). That is the secret, for that enables a person to discover true self-dharma : ‘Own’s own dharma, however imperfect, is a safer guide than the dharma of another, however perfect’ (Shloka 47).

The key shloka, the final advice, is in number 63 : ‘This is the subtle wisdom I give you. Think it over. You are free to choose’ (yathecchasi tatha kuru). If the ultimate goal is freedom, the means too must be freedom to choose. ‘Him whom I love, I would make free even from me’.